


A Heartless Winter

by The_Necroposter



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, End of the World, Friendship, Hope, Hopeful Ending, Military Science Fiction, Other, Science Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-27
Updated: 2016-10-27
Packaged: 2018-08-27 07:48:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8393203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Necroposter/pseuds/The_Necroposter
Summary: Kathy Flynn scouts the universe in search of something that will save humanity from ultimate extinction. Can there ever be an end to the heartless winter her people face?





	

**Author's Note:**

> Between bigger fan fiction / spitefic projects, here's a sci-fi short story from my creative writing class.

Mark didn’t let on that he was scared. He was probably grateful that Kathy couldn’t see much of his face, what with the knit cap, goggles, and scarf wrapped over his chin, mouth, and nose. If one spent enough time with him, though, it was fairly easy to read his emotions by simply observing his body language. He was tense, coiled, jumpy. What little was exposed of his fair skin looked even paler in the cold daylight. Yes, he was scared, all right.  

It wasn’t as if Kathy blamed him. This was a weird place and an even weirder situation. She wondered whether he was able to read her as well as she could read him – probably. Even though he was twenty years her junior, he was a very bright, very perceptive person. Not all people required her span of years to see more than just themselves, it seemed.

As they made their way down the old, cracked, deserted street of this dead city, weaving through abandoned vehicle carcasses that were overgrown with vines and weeds, they said not one word to each other. Their boots raised grey dust off the old concrete, which swirled about their calves, caking their dark-blue cargo trousers in a fine layer of dirt that had not been disturbed in decades.

This must have been the place to be during the living days of the colony. It was the largest street in the city, lined with crumbling skyscrapers and billboards that no longer advertised anything. The humans had tried to leave in a panicked rush; not many had succeeded. Kathy had followed the news of the fall of this colony with shock and horror and disbelief. They’d all mourned the dead. They’d all wondered what they were supposed to do next. Everyone had wanted to help. No-one had been able to change a damn thing.

Mark was too young to remember any of this with his hardly three decades of life, but of course he’d grown up with the stories: one by one, the colonies of humanity had fallen, until there was hardly anything left that could be called human – not even the humans themselves, some argued.

Kathy didn’t agree; humans had always had the capacity for greatness and for evil in equal measure. It was a freedom of choice kind of deal that both religious and secular people could agree to believe in. You could choose to be human in the face of death. You could choose to be a monster, too. That was all part of being human, and awful deeds didn’t cheapen or even negate the good ones. No, people were faced with pain and loss and horror and death every single day, and yet, most of them rose up to the occasion once called upon. That was, in Kathy’s eyes, what it truly meant to be human: having a choice between the easy way and the right one, and choosing the latter every time it truly mattered.

The Corps, of course, was a force for good at all times. If one could not believe that, then there was nothing left to believe in – not anymore.

Inside what were the remains of a public transport vehicle, she saw blank human bones. Her skin, protected by thick clothing as it was, broke out in gooseflesh. Her stomach lurched. She looked away. Images of the newsfeeds covering the destruction of the colony popped up before her mind’s eye, and she trampled them down with stern vehemence. Oh, no. No time for that crap. Neither she nor Mark had the luxury for an emotional breakdown right now…or ever, come to think about it. In any case, they were here to do a job. That was all that mattered. Their people depended on them for this. She had promised to not disappoint them. She wouldn’t. She _couldn’t_.

“You sure it’s safe to breathe any of this shit in, sir?” Mark’s voice was muffled by the scarf, but still, his voice carried through the dead landscape, echoing, bouncing off the abandoned carcasses and forever muted towers.

Kathy only just refrained from flinching. She cast a look at her lieutenant over her left shoulder. “The scarf is filtering out the dust; everything else is safe…at least the scanners said so.”

“Comforting,” he replied flatly, and she could all but see him rolling his eyes. “The ship’s scanners are never wrong, after all.”

“You didn’t want the breathing mask, Summers.”

“Not if I can help it, no.”

Despite feeling strangely weighed down and hollow at the same time, she had to smile a little. If there was one thing Mark hated more than the cumbersome breathing masks, it was awkward silences.

“Don’t worry,” she said, ignoring the unpleasant sensation of her breath condensing against the heavy wool of her white uniform scarf, “the ship scanners know how to tell if we can breathe somewhere or not. The air’s fine.”

“It’s too late to worry about it, now, anyway.”

As she stepped over a little crater in the concrete, whilst ignoring the bones of a human arm hanging out the wreck of a decaying vehicle, she tried not to get lost in the eerie feeling of being watched by the dead eyes of the skyscrapers’ broken windows. Mark was right in complaining about the ship’s scanners having a tendency to malfunction at the most inopportune times, but after last month’s overhaul, they were working fine. There was no life down here that could threaten them. Scanners had picked up plants and insects, birds, amphibians, small reptiles, small mammals etc. etc., but nothing big or poisonous enough to be considered an immediate danger to the scouting teams.

Kathy and Mark were in charge of looking for the relevant energy signature in the capital city. Three other signatures had been detected; three other duos were looking at the respective coordinates.

During the last ten scouting missions, they had found nothing. Well, that wasn’t precisely true; something useful could usually be recovered from the planets, of course. They didn’t find what they were so desperately looking for, though: the energy spheres they needed to complete the machine. They needed the machine to find their enemy. They needed to find their enemy in order to save their species. In that sense, every single mission had been a complete bust; they were no closer to finding the pieces of the puzzle that might lead to their salvation than they had been five years ago…

…and the clock was ticking. Every day that went by without results, they edged closer to extinction.

Why did everything always have to be this fucking difficult? It was enough to make one question one’s dogged clinging on to hope.

Kathy though, who was well aware that she was mostly known by the moniker of Commander Pragmatic, refused to let herself be crushed by despair. No, she would go on and on and on until there was nowhere left to run – until all alternatives were spent. She owed it to the ones who had not made it this far. All of them did – all of them who were still breathing.

“How far is it?”

She checked her tracker. “Next block to the right.”

“They could always let us land closer to the mark, but I suppose they think we need the exercise.”

Again, she cast him a look over her shoulder. “Do you want to land the shuttle in the middle of all this wreckage?” She waited, but he didn’t reply. “Besides, you know that the scanners can only pinpoint to a certain degree. That’s why we need the trackers once we’re on the ground.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, and sighed. “But just between you and me, Commander, I could use with a little less ghost-town sight-seeing. This place gives me the creeps.”

“The others didn’t?” Smack ahead, a big, overturned lorry blocked the way. She veered to the right, closer to the cluttered pavement, willing herself not to look at what was left of those who had tried to run away from certain death.

“This is different.”

“I suppose it is.” It was. This had been the first one. This had been the one big in the news, when the newsfeed had still been an interstellar thing. To this day, human children were shown footage of the Fall of Andril. Those images were part of the collective memory of humanity – what was left of it, anyway. Kathy had seen it happening live, on TV, when she’d still been a green little kid of no more than twenty years of age. Not a day had gone by since then during which she didn’t think of that fateful day. “Summers? This is the street.”

It was a laborious, slow process, but finally, they managed to leave the High Street and get on the one branching off to the right. It was less broad but twice as cluttered. A big traffic jam was the last thing thousands of people had been engaged in enduring when their end found them. Kathy and Mark had to climb over the vehicles, careful to not injure themselves, hoping they would not disturb the peace of this monumental graveyard.

Of course she had to think about the skeletons in the cars and on the street; they’d been people, once – human beings. They’d died suddenly, horribly, and were left out in the open to rot. Over time, their flesh had decomposed, their clothes, their hair, until nothing was left but bare bone. All of their individual features were long gone. They were nothing but a jumble of human bones lying here in this ghost town, on this ghost planet, destroyed, robbed of everything they had ever been, everything they might ever become, silenced forever.

Her teeth gritted, she climbed down a black van and planted her feet on the pavement. Dust clouds billowed up. She did her best to ignore her heavy heart. When Mark stepped up to her right, she pointed at a comparatively tiny, three-story brick building that was less than fifty metres away. “That’s the place.”

“Great. Now we actually have to go inside one these. Awesome.”

“Just be thankful it’s not the thirtieth story of some skyscraper.” Without waiting for a reply, she set into motion again. Blissfully, the pavement was pretty empty apart from the occasional heap of human remains and some debris, as well as dead foliage. Some rats scurried away as the unfamiliar bipeds encroached on their territory, but Kathy hardly noticed them.

It didn’t take them long to get to the building in question. Despite the fact that more than thirty years had passed since the colony’s end, the engraved plating above the huge double doors of this robust reddish cube still clearly read ‘Post Office’. Wow. It had been so long since Kathy had actually seen one of these, she had quite forgotten that they had ever existed in the first place.

“From what I can gather,” she said, pointing at the green dot on her tracker’s black display, “the signature is right in front of us – ground floor.”

“Let’s hope it’s not too crowded in there,” Mark said, and Kathy saw that he shivered.

Maybe it was just the bitter cold causing this, but she didn’t think so. Out of the two of them, she had always been the one who suffered more in low temperatures, and her uniform was keeping her warm enough for government work – another depressing idiom that was slowly losing all meaning. Well, as of now, they still had a government of sorts, and both Kathy and Mark were its employees. They had a job to do. Dithering around would get them nowhere.

Sighing inwardly, she said, “No time like the present,” stepped up to the cracked glass doors, and pushed one of them open carefully, only so much that it would allow her and Mark to pass.

The door creaked loudly, but didn’t collapse, which was a small blessing. The air inside smelled stale and dead. It was murky, and they had to blink for a while until their sight adjusted itself. Eventually, though, it did, and they got a good view of the post office’s main room.

Kathy felt a strange heaviness bearing down on her limbs; her body had, it seemed, turned to lead. All she wanted was to leave this desolate place, this monument of sorrow; she wanted nothing more than to get back to the ship, lock herself in her cramped little quarters, climb into bed, and sleep forever.

The place was littered with desiccated corpses sitting on benches, sprawled out on the floor, hugging, their fingers still intertwined. It looked as if some of them had been praying at the moment of their deaths. Had they sung hymns? The national anthem? Had they wept? Had they been silent and calm? Maybe all of this at once. Probably. The strength of the human spirit was heard to grasp and even harder to break. No matter what happened, no matter how horrible things got, people always found a way of being surprisingly graceful, surprisingly _good_.

That was why Kathy trudged on as she did. That was why she would never, ever give up until they either found a way to make it all stop or the clock ran out on them.

“Commander? Commander Flynn?”

Kathy snapped out of it and turned to face Mark. “I’m sorry. I…” She couldn’t finish that thought. She just couldn’t.

“I know,” Mark said, and the soft, quiet tone he used was almost enough to break down her already chipped walls completely. He stepped up to her and briefly placed a heavy hand on her shoulder. Then, he sighed audibly. “What does the tracker say?”

As best as she could, she swallowed down the knot in the throat. “Over there. Behind the counter.”

“Okay.”

They both set out, gingerly stepping over the dead, dodging baggage and personal objects, rubble and glass. They had to climb over the counter to get to the exact spot, which was a little tricky due to its decaying and the fact that it was littered with glass shards and shrapnel, but eventually, they managed. In the back of the room, there sat the dried-up corpse of what had once been a woman; in her hands, she was clutching a black leather handbag.

Kathy felt her heart pick up the pace. Her stomach lurched again, and her mouth felt horribly dry. Her blood was pounding in her ears, her hands were icy-cold, and an almost painful chill slithered down her spine. This was it. Moment of truth. Make or break. “It’s in there.”

After a moment’s silent reluctance, Mark nodded curtly, and said, “I’ll get it, sir,” with both resolve and resignation. He crossed the distance to the poor woman’s remains, sighed again, hunkered down, said, “Fuck it,” and broke her grip on the handbag quickly and efficiently. Her bones snapped with a strange, hollow whipping sound. Dust flew up. Mark coughed, even though it had to be psychosomatic, since his eyes and mouth and nose were covered up. “Here we go.” With something akin to awe, he picked up the handbag and got up to his feet. “It’s heavy.”

It wasn’t easy, but Kathy managed to keep up the façade of calmness. “Let me see.”

He carried the thing back to her like it was the holy grail, or something equally dramatic. “Probably just the most cherished piece out of her rock collection.” Not even he could successfully project nonchalance right now.

“Only one way to find out,” she said, knowing this was a clichéd response, but being grateful that her brain was able to scramble anything coherent together. Gingerly, she pulled open the bag’s zipper and opened the bag itself up, as Mark still held onto it. Her heart was thrumming furiously, now, and she tasted bile at the back of her throat. It would be another disappointment, most likely, but being aware of the odds of success never made her any less nervous during their scouting missions.

With a slightly trembling hand, she pulled her torch out of her coat pocket and shone its cold, white light into the bag’s black interior. There was only one object in it; it was a metallic sphere that looked as smooth as liquid silver.

“My God,” she heard herself whisper as she put the torch away again and reached inside the bag with both hands.

“What? Is it…I mean… _is it?_ ” Mark’s voice sounded a little squeaky, like he was a boy waiting for his birthday surprise.

“It is,” she said, and drew in a sharp breath. Unable and unwilling to help herself, she laughed. Her vision got blurry, and she blinked. Bawling whilst wearing goggles was not the greatest of ideas. With now steady hands, she pulled the orange-sized sphere from the bag and held it up, let what little light was in this doomed building shine upon its beautiful surface. “Toss the bag aside and hold this.”

Mark did so immediately, holding the thing away from him with even more reverence than before.

Kathy grabbed her tracker again and switched the function to scanning. Numbers poured across the little screen, and whilst she watched them, she couldn’t stop herself from grinning broadly. Weight dropped off her shoulders like an anvil. She could’ve danced. Even sillier than that, she could’ve hugged Mark. “Bingo,” she said, giggling like a young girl. “Step one in saving the human race: accomplished.”

“Now, all we need are nine others, and then we can get the machine to work that may or may not lead us to the realm of the enemy, which may or may not provide us with a way to make them stop slaughtering our people. Awesome! All our problems are solved. Now, where’s that goddamned champagne?”

She grimaced, slapped his arm, scooped the sphere out of his hands, and secured it into her bag. The strap slung across her shoulders tugged at them, now; this thing was surprisingly heavy. “Don’t be such a Negative Nancy. This is a huge success, Lieutenant Summers. Enjoy it.”

“I am,” he said, and she could gather from his tone of voice that he was smiling, too. “I’m just so well-practiced at being a cynical jerk, I have no idea how to switch it off.”

“Kind of comes with the job, these days, doesn’t it?” She comradely patted his shoulder. “Come on. Let’s get out of this tomb.”

“I hear you there, sir.”

Little later, they were outside again, blinking into a rare ray of sunshine piercing the thick layer of clouds. The air was very cold, but not unpleasantly so – not anymore. It seemed that for the first time since forever, things might actually be working for their benefit. Andril had, in the end, had a last ace up its sleeve. Her people had not perished in vain. Finally, they were getting somewhere. Finally, hope was a justified emotion.

“Look,” Mark said, held out his gloved hand, and caught a little snowflake on his palm. “Winter is starting.”

“They say winter is always heartless,” Kathy said, squinting up at the skies for a moment, “but I always thought it peaceful rather than sad. It gives us the opportunity to put old grief to rest and start anew once the spring arrives.”

“Could be that this isn't just a romantic notion, but actually a thing that exists,” Mark said in a weirdly dreamy tone that was so unlike him, she blinked at him in wonder.

Then, she laughed – lightly, carelessly…happy. Good Lord. She hadn't thought that this was even remotely possible anymore for a very, very long time. It was, though. Here they were, the only living people amongst a sea of decay, and yet, as the sentimental quote insisted on claiming, hope sprung eternal.

Maybe it did. Maybe it really did.

“Come on,” she said, briefly touching his arm, “Let’s head back to the shuttle, lest you freeze to the spot and turn into an optimistic philosopher on me.”

“Like that’s ever gonna happen,” he said, clearly playful, and waved off. “I’m too much of a self-important misanthropist for that syrupy crap.”

“That’s the spirit,” she said, and started trudging back toward the way they’d come.

He followed her wordlessly, but this time, the silence wasn’t heavy. This time, both of them just didn’t need to use their words to express what they were both feeling – that maybe, just maybe, for _once_ , fortune truly favoured the bold, and that what was left of their species still had a fighting chance of survival.


End file.
